Global Urbanization

Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter

Publication Year: 2011

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Much of this urbanization has been fueled by the rapidly growing cities of the developing world, exemplified most dramatically by booming megacities such as Lagos, Karachi, and Mumbai. In the coming years, as both the number and scale of cities continue to increase, the most important matters of social policy and economic development will necessarily be urban issues. Urbanization, across the world but especially in Asia and Africa, is perhaps the critical issue of the twenty-first century.

Global Urbanization surveys essential dimensions of this growth and begins to formulate a global urban agenda for the next half century. Drawing from many disciplines, the contributors tackle issues ranging from how cities can keep up with fast-growing housing needs to the possibilities for public-private partnerships in urban governance. Several essays address the role that cutting-edge technologies such as GIS software, remote sensing, and predictive growth models can play in tracking and forecasting urban growth. Reflecting the central importance of the Global South to twenty-first-century urbanism, the volume includes case studies and examples from China, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Brazil.

While the challenges posed by large-scale urbanization are immense, the future of human development requires that we find ways to promote socially inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, and resilient infrastructure. The timely and relevant scholarship assembled in Global Urbanization will be of great interest to scholars and policymakers in demography, geography, urban studies, and international development.

Part I. Twenty-First-Century Population Prospect: Emerging Needs

Chapter 1. World Urbanization: The Critical Issue of the Twenty-First Century

In 2010, a majority of the world’s population lived in cities, an important
milestone actually reached in 2008; by 2050, this proportion will
approach 70 percent. These simple facts point in two directions: looking
back, they confirm the intensity with which the world has urbanized over
the past fifty years and, moving forward, they mark the world’s cities as...

Chapter 2. Human Population Grows Up

The decade ending in 2010 spanned three unique, important transitions
in the history of humankind. Before 2000, young people always
outnumbered old people. From 2000 forward, old people will outnumber
young people. Until approximately 2007, rural people always outnumbered
urban people. From approximately 2007 forward, urban...

It took the development community two decades, if not more, to come
to terms with the unprecedented urban growth rates that occurred in
the developing world between 1950 and 2005 (figure 3.1). The dramatic
increase in the proportion of urban population—from 17 percent to 26
percent—that took place between 1950 and 1975 was the first sign that...

Chapter 4. Urban Growth and Development at Six Scales: An Economist’s View

The world’s population, roughly 6.7 billion people, spreads over about
13 billion hectares of land. (Of course, much of this land is arid or
otherwise inhospitable to settlement, but more on that later.) Variously
considered, people live in nations, regions, cities, and neighborhoods.
The study of their urbanization is, more or less, the study of density as...

Chapter 5. Urban Growth and Spatial Development: The China Case

China has experienced rapid urban growth since the adoption of Economic
Reform and Open Policy in 1978. Not only is more than one-third
of the country’s population now living in cities, but the remaining
population is becoming increasingly dependent on cities and towns for
its economic survival and livelihood. At the National People’s Congress...

Part II. Urban Spatial Growth and Development

As urban populations continue to grow, poor countries and international
aid agencies are likely to face mounting pressure to rethink their
development strategies and set priorities with both rural and urban
interests in mind. To engage effectively with the emerging trends, countries
and agencies will need to base their decisions on demographic estimates...

Chapter 7. Measuring and Modeling Global Urban Expansion

From the perspective of global urbanization, the first decade of the
twenty-first century will be seen not as the time when the problems associated
with urbanization first became apparent (these have been widely
understood since the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier), nor as
the time when the basic outlines of policy solutions first attained wide-...

Chapter 8. Urban Growth Models: State of the Art and Prospects

Once known as urban activity models, urban growth models (UGMs)
emerged in the mid-1960s out of advances in regional science, huge
improvements in computing speed and storage capacity (or so they
seemed at the time), a newfound surplus of detailed activity data,
and federal mandates coupled with funding for metropolitan planning...

The size of the world’s growing urban population gives urgency to the
need for accurate estimates of the location, size, and growth of existing
urban areas as well as forecasts of likely regions, magnitudes, and configurations
of future urban growth. However, to date, there exists no
global database that accurately describes and maps which portions of...

Fast-growing Nairobi, Kenya, the most populous city in East Africa,
offers an important example of how a municipality that lacks modern
maps and databases turns to spatial technologies, especially remotesensing
and geographic information system (GIS) technologies, to track
urban growth and development and inform public and private infra-...

Part III. Urban Governance and Finance

Chapter 11. Strategic Directions for Local Public Finance in Developing Countries

Fiscal decentralization and local government finance in developing
countries have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years,
particularly with respect to urban areas. A well-developed literature
focuses on policy and institutional-design concerns driven by public
finance/fiscal federalism and new public management principles (Bahl...

Policymakers, practitioners, and academics around the world make compelling
arguments for bridging public and private sectors through alliance,
collaboration, and partnership. Based on the logic of pragmatism,
they cast these arrangements as innovative and resourceful ways of dealing
with the intensifying demands of urbanization. Infrastructure policy...

Chapter 13. City Building in China: Implications for Urban Form Efficiency

Current Chinese city-building processes can be viewed from a land efficiency
perspective and through the prism of the key actors, particularly
(1) local governments (municipal, urban district, county), (2) the
national government, which has become increasingly interventionist in
response to energy efficiency, agricultural land protection, and housing-...

Chapter 14. Financing Housing and Urban Services

Bertrand Renaud (1987) said that cities are built the way they are
financed. The financing of housing and of urban infrastructure and services
is crucial to the functioning of cities. Housing finance and urban
finance share several characteristics. First, both are instruments that can
be used to increase the overall standard of living. The ultimate goal of...

Part IV. Cases in Urban Development

Chapter 15. Managing Urban Infrastructure and Services in India

India, with an urban population of about 341 million (2007 estimate),
is challenged with how to provide adequate levels of infrastructure and
services in its many rapidly growing cities. Although only 29.2 percent
of the total population is urban, in absolute terms that population is
huge, almost equal to the combined urban population of the United...

Chapter 16. Sustainable Urban Development: Managing City Development in Uganda

Although traditional urban centers existed in Uganda before colonization,
developing around the seats of reigning kings and their governments,
urbanization with a western touch only surfaced in the
nineteenth century as administrative centers and agricultural markets
were established. This history is important in understanding the evolu-...

The prevalent forms of housing among low-income groups in Brazil vary
according to the city and period considered. In each place and time, a
specific form of housing has been prevalent in the urban landscape.
Three basic types of housing stand out: slums (corti

Chapter 18. The Education of Urban Dwellers: The Kenyan Experience

In any discussion on development in sub-Saharan Africa one must, at
the outset, be wary of too much generalization, which can turn simplistic.
Africa is a very large continent, and the sub-Saharan region is characterized
by an enormous diversity of nation states, peoples, and customs.
There are, however, numerous challenges in common, challenges that...

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

In July 2007, in Italy, the Rockefeller Foundation hosted the month-long
Global Urban Summit at its Bellagio Center. The foundation invited the
Penn Institute for Urban Research (IUR) to develop a week-long session,
‘‘Toward a Twenty-First-Century Urban Agenda,’’ to explore
emerging research issues related to twenty-first-century urbanization.

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.